Today's Party of God Update

South Carolina voters receive "Vote for Daschle is a Vote for SODOMY" window stickers

And this is the kind of thing I think about when I see complaints about Democrats pulling lawyers "pre-emptively" into the campaign - it's in response to this kind of stuff:

In Florida, anonymous "absentee ballot" collectors targeting elderly, minourity, low-income Democratic voters, claiming to be election officials. Ballots then disappear.

In South Dakota, More illegal absentee ballot handling, and KELO-TV reported that the former governor and GOP congressman in South Dakota says the national GOP is encouraging campaign workers to cheat

Oregon GOP to target Democratic-heavy polling places to watch voting and challenge vote legitimacy on any technicality.

Republicans are going to place around 3,500 vote-challengers in polling places... just in Ohio, iirc. Democrats are hoping to have 2,000 counter-observers.

irritating connection issue

So I'm trying to download this file that the REST OF THE WORLD can download just fine, and I can't get past byte 2,031,357. Even wget contacting the server and asking for a resend from the failure point gets a 206 (okay, continuing from last point) and then - nothing, until it times out.

We're running into that kind of thing semi-regularly. It's REALLY annoying.

No proxies are involved, it's all fixed IP addresses, we're talking right upstream to our IP provider, we aren't losing connection to the host because a new connection works just fine - we move a boatload of data at 80KB/sec and then it just. stops.

Meanwhile, of course other people can get the item in question just fine.

It only happens with larger files. i don't know where there's a cutoff, if there is one. Huge files will transfer fine from one host and smaller large ones will fail from another host at the same time. Size and capability of the sender are irrelevant, as far as we can tell. (This has happened against tiny hosts and microsoft.com both, for example.)

Once (so far) if we left a wget running overnight, a file transfer "stuck" like this eventually worked. Trying it again later didn't work.

At least one person apparently has had the same kind of trouble downloading a large file from us. Other people downloaded it easily, but he couldn't pull it down on multiple retries. High rate streaming followed by complete shutdown.

I'm mystified. Help? Anybody?